It’s no secret that perimenopause has become a hot topic over recent years; the word is plugged into search engines more than 200,000 times each month. It’s less common knowledge, though, that hormonal changes during the perimenopause stage can significantly affect cardiovascular risk.
Center Core Faculty member Sung Kyun Park, ScD, MPH, professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health Sciences, was named the 2026 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award acclaimed for his strong teaching and mentoring skills. Over the course of his fifteen year career as a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, he has developed and led impactful coursework, mentored students in and out of the classroom, and been committed to the continuous improvement of education across the school.
“What we see differently during midlife is that the pattern of physical functioning limitations is really quite dynamic. We see that over that midlife phase, people are as likely to decline in their physical functioning as they are to improve. And what this really suggests to us is that midlife is a really important life stage to think about improving health, because it is dynamic, it is malleable.”
“They’re a very, very invisible population,” said Alexis Handal, a University of Michigan professor who co-leads the Michigan Farmworker Project alongside researcher Lisbeth Iglesias-Ríos.
“Since there are limited treatment options for RSV, it's important to understand the potential long-term outcomes of severe RSV infection so that clinicians and public health workers can identify who might benefit from additional follow-up after their illness. This information can also help inform efforts to prevent disease or reduce severity, such as through vaccination, which is now available to certain groups of adults.”
“If you open an endocrinology textbook and look at what hormone patterns look like across the menopause transition, that is data from SWAN ... SWAN is by far the largest, longest, most in-depth study of women traversing the midlife and menopausal transition and then following them into late adulthood” — Carrie Karvonen-Gutierrez, PhD, MPH (Associate Chair for Faculty Affairs, Epidemiology and Director, Center for Lifecourse Epidemiology and Aging Research)
“Cardiovascular comorbidities such as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes may also cause hot flashes way before a woman’s transition begins. It is likely that underlying cardiovascular conditions may increase risk of hot flashes, and frequent, high intensity hot flashes experienced for a long duration may increase cardiovascular risk.”
Initiated in 2013, MiLES is a newly established cohort study which creates and maintains the MiLES Longitudinal Cohort & Biobank, including lupus cases from the southeast Michigan surveillance registry as well as population-based controls.
Now in its 31th year, the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation is a multi-site, multi-ethnic longitudinal, study designed to examine the health — physical, biological, psychological and social changes — of women during the midlife and as they age. The resulting research helps scientists, health care providers and women learn how mid-life experiences affect health and quality of life during the midlife and as they age.
The 36-year MBHMS follows the daughters of participants in the historic Tecumseh Community Health Study to evaluate the impact of aging-related processes including menopause and the secular increase in obesity on the development and progression of musculoskeletal disease and declines in physical functioning. This study addresses a significant gap in scientific knowledge that impedes our ability to optimize fracture prevention strategies. If our hypotheses prove correct, baseline external bone size may be used as an additional parameter to identify women most likely to lose bone strength rapidly during the MT and who might benefit from early intervention.